As one would expect, artificial intelligence was a big theme at last week’s National Retail Federation’s annual event in New York City, as it was last year, but there was one subtle difference. The 2025 edition was focused more on AI education, whereas I felt this year’s NRF focused more on use cases. In fact, one of the speakers I saw said something to the effect that NRF is no longer a technology show but rather a business outcomes event.
As CES wound down, industry watchers are now turning their attention to the National Retail Federation show across the country in New York. Retail, once is slow moving industry, is now ripe with change and the in-store environments have become operationally more complex.
One of the highlights of the CES event last week was the Nvidia Corp. keynote delivered by Chief Executive Jensen Huang. Though there are many focal points to an event such as CES, the one pervasive theme is artificial intelligence, and no company has become more synonymous with AI than Nvidia. That’s why thousands of people queued up for hours in advance to hear the latest and greatest vision and product news from the company’s leader.
Artificial intelligence leader Nvidia Corp. Monday announced the Nemotron-3 family of models, data and tools, and the release is further evidence of the company’s commitment to the open ecosystem, focusing on delivering highly efficient, accurate and transparent models essential for building sophisticated agentic AI applications.
High-performance network provider Arista Networks Inc. today announced the next wave of innovations for its campus network solutions. The new products include expansion of its Virtual ES with Path Aliasing, or VESPA, offering, which will make it easier for businesses to deploy large-scale mobility domains. The Santa Clara networking company also announced it is expanding its Autonomous Virtual Assistant, or AVA, its agentic artificial intelligence solution, to help organizations streamline AI operations use cases.